Entries in East Africa
(3)

In the prior post, I talked about steps governments in East Africa can take to lift the natural resource curse that plagues the region. Let's look now at how extractive companies and foreign governments can also help make life better for millions of people.

There's no silver bullet to overcome the natural resource cursethat haunts much of the globe. But countries in East Africa, the region I am most familiar with, can take several practical and affordable steps to exploit resources in ways that will benefit citizens and put realistic development goals within reach.

Since discovering oil in 2009, Uganda has not pumped a single barrel and the resource remains unexploited. An historic opportunity has so far been stymied by bureaucracy, law suits, corruption, hostilities with neighbors taking on a military hue, as well as the lack of adequate infrastructure to move the oil to market.